Panning for Gold
Channel 1 is the dry (uneffected) sound. You can certainly put a percentage of that in your mix, if you want.
This is true. It's all about what you want to hear in the mains and how you are running the mains from the mixer - in Stereo or Mono
In Mono, you would send only one output (Left or Right) to both mains -usually wired as Mixer Left (or Right) OUT -> Amplifier MONO IN, Amplifier MONO OUT-> Speaker 1 -> Speaker 2.
I'm not positive but I do think that many amplifiers will "sum" the signal for you (i.e. take two signals and put them together into one mono signal). The wiring is slightly different:
Mixer Left OUT and Mixer Right OUT -> Amplifier Left IN and Amplifier Right IN respectively, Amplifier MONO OUT -> Speaker 1 -> Speaker 2.
In both of these examples, the sound coming out of the Left speaker is the same as the sound coming out of the Right speaker.
In Stereo, one speaker is designated as Left and one speaker is designated as Right. You feed two inputs to the amplifier - one gets sent to the Left speaker and one to the Right speaker. The wiring is like this:
Mixer Left OUT -> Amplifier Left IN, Amplifier Left OUT -> Left Speaker
Mixer Right OUT -> Amplifier Right IN, Amplifier Right OUT -> Right Speaker
My recommendation to you is to run in a MONO configuration. Send the RIGHT output from the mixer to the amplifier. If you don't want any dry signal, keep both channels panned as you have them. To add some dry signal, adjust Channel 1's pan to the right until you have the desired sound. You will likely have to mess with your volume settings again after doing this as you'll probably knock them out of balance.
Have fun with it. Be sure to record your settings once you've tweaked them (knobs sometimes move in transit).
- Mike